The computer has greatly affected essentially all forms of information management, including the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture to service and disposal. The term for this process is Product Lifecycle Management, or PLM. It is a cornerstone of a corporation's IT digital structure. One of the features of PLM is to collect knowledge that can be reused for other projects and to coordinate concurrent development of many products. PLM can also include the coordination of and management of product definition data, including configuring product variations. The management of product definition data involves managing that product's bill of materials. The bill of materials, or BOM, describes the product in a tabular format and in terms of its assemblies, sub-assemblies, and basic components and parts. The BOM is a subset of a larger bill of information concept which can enumerate information that is related to a product or a process and provide sufficient information as it is designed, manufactured, ordered, built, maintained, and/or processed.
Referring to product design and development, when a product is designed as a generic product family, it has to be configured to a specific product variant or product variant family for almost every business process throughout the entire product life cycle. Every manufactured product instance, every physical or digital prototype, every analysis or simulation, is based on a specific product variant configuration. Throughout the product development process, various disciplines produce generic product representations that model the product as a generic product family and can be configured to a specific product variant or product variant family. However, each discipline, e.g., part BOM, CAD, or Manufacturing Engineering, uses different product representations with different level of detail regarding variant configuration. A part BOM usually creates variant configuration data specifying all product variants a given part usage is necessary for. CAD requires additional variant data that specifies position and deformation (e.g. of a hose) of the geometry representing a given part usage in the part BOM. Manufacturing Engineering needs even more variant data specifying the assembly process of the specific position and shape in a given part usage. For example, a robot may need to deform and position a flexible hose in many different ways, depending on product components that may cross the robot path.
The growing complexity of product configurations has made it very difficult to determine whether instances that were mapped between two product representations, e.g., CAD structure and part BOM, cover the same quantity. For example, it is not predictable how many positioned design instances of a wheel are necessary to completely map to the wheels in the part BOM of a truck with dual tire option in two wheelbases, with optional spare tires. Depending on the CAD design and origin, anything between 11 and 17 design instances could be required, not including design instances representing deformations or articulated positions of the wheel.
There is a need for a solution for determining whether the instances that are mapped between different product representations completely align or show quantity mismatches.